About half the population will be happy on this Inauguration Day, the other half not so much. There must be a better way to distribute political power so that happiness (which, after all, is written into the Declaration of Independence) will be spread more evenly across the population, and there is a better way. I call it Geographical demoracy.
Any political system is unstable when two sides are divided more or less evenly and are unwilling or unable to engage in rational discussion. That’s the situation now. We are at least two nations, and this is nothing new. There were two nations when Lincoln was elected in 1861, and they eventually chose to fight. All over the world now, we see violent conflicts often based on what seem to be trivial differences.
Just as kids will pick on other kids for having big ears or strange clothes, so slight variations in language, ethnicity, religion and any dissimilarity can be used to justify a fight. This human weakness was satirized by Jonathan Swift almost three hundred years ago in Gulliver’s Travels, when he wrote of the war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians, bitterly divided about which end to open boiled eggs.
The great project of the nineteenth century was to smooth over these cultural differences through nation-building. Countries like Germany and Italy were created from a mass of fragmented states and principalities, and the “United States” struggled and fought to become one huge nation under one government and one constitution – perhaps too huge. The proposal to expand the USA by appropriating Canada, Greenland, Panama, and possibly Mexico and Europe, is going in completely the wrong direction. In the recent election, voting maps showed vividly that we are or have become at least two distinct nations. This is not a crazy idea.
You can find a dozen books by serious scholars suggesting that the United States can and should be divided into two or more parts and that our only choice is between unity, which means mutual tolerance, conflict, which is unthinkable, and separation. Since mutual tolerance is not on the agenda, separation is the logical choice.
How would this work? One President and one government will never be able to satisfy everybody. We need, at the very least, two Presidents. There are historical precedents. The Roman Emperor Diocletian devised a system of two emperors, Augustus and Caesar, respectively. From 1378 to 1417, there were two Popes, one in Avignon and one in Rome.
That’s my modest proposal: two presidents representing different populations in different territories and promoting different social policies. Like the two popes, they could spend their time abusing and denouncing one another. Everyone would be happy, knowing that their chosen president was in his own personal White House. Nothing would get done, of course, but nothing gets done now.
Some relocation would be necessary so everyone could feel comfortable and safe with their right-thinking neighbors. But, in the end, every group of discontented citizens would find a place where they could be happy, their own ideal territory like a gated community or private island, shared and governed only by people exactly like them in every way.
It may sound fantastic, and even ridiculous—as most brilliant ideas do at first—but it is the only thing that might work.